Examples.

This is one of th magazine covers I have used and taken influence from for my own front cover.

Photoshop Practice

This is my photoshop practice with colour isolation and general photoshop practice

Front cover

This is the front cover for my media magazine.

This is the contents page for my This Generation/TG magazine

This picture has only been modified enough to remove elements like the contrasting colours.
Elements that were to be included nut eventually were not had a TCR logo in the higher left corner, (which suffered technical difficulties) and a tagline in support of this fundraiser and to encourage others.
Some correction such as buttoning the top button and straightening the tie via photoshop tools.

Jared Leto saves fans from alleged bomber

According to internet reports, 30 Seconds To Mars frotnman Jared Leto saved fans from an alleged suicide bomber last night in Los Angeles.

Fans were gathered at The Hive in West Hollywood for a special screening of a new 30 Seconds To Mars documentary when, at approximately 8:30PM, a young man in a black hooded top stormed into the venue. He pushed his way to the front of the room and dropped a large box covered in gold wrapping paper at Leto’s feet.

When the singer asked him to leave the stage, the unidentified male said “It’s time for a little self-help” and is then said to have allegedly muttered something about having explosives. Upon hearing this, Leto wrestled with the man and dragged him out of the room.

“[It was] weird,” said one eyewitness. “Everyone in the room watched him walk toward Jared. Jared said ‘Someone stop him’ three or four times, but no one did. The guy got to Jared, dropped the box on the floor and started to give a speech. Jared grabbed him by the shoulders and basically [dragged] him out the back door."

The alleged bomber was restrained by the band’s security guards until the police and bomb disposal experts arrived.

“I just finished with the police,” Leto wrote on his Twitter at 11PM last night. “They cleared five blocks and brought in the bomb squad and [sniffer] dogs.”

As can be seen, this article is rather short and direct but also seems in many ways to use words that exaggerate the situation or else create a powerful impact, such as claiming that the man “stormed” into the stage and how Jared Leto “wrestled” the man away despite the fan footage of the incident making it seem far less dramatic than one would possibly suspect from the language used in the article. Including the quote from Leto’s blog is also an example of this, as it does not seem needed, it is merely there for either shock value or to enhance the viewers excitement.

Moral Panic

Moral Panic is a term that means that the media and a large group of people rise against a certain group of people or social value. Moral Panic has been risen against subjects that are simply disliked rather than actually wrong (subjects to have been demonised include black people and homosexsuality).

Ideology

Ideology, simply put, is the overall feel and tone of a piece of media, in order to keep things on a constant level

Ideologies can be very different across different cultures, like an American and English drama or soap opera, while there will be similarities, will contain some very clear differences and to other cultures such as the Spanish or Chinese may be completely and totally different to them.

Hegemony is an Ideology which has been a dominant Ideology and is widely accepted, for instance that police are good people or that war is bad. However, these do not necessarily dominate our society as a whole, since stories against police and supporting war are relatively common.

Rule of Thirds

The rule of thirds essentially introduces guide lines and intersection points to the framing of a picture being taken, as shown by the river tree picture used below; the rule of third is used to direct the viewer’s eye as humans naturally will look at certain structures; this works by having 3 boxes up and down the image and using them as a placement guide. This is mainly done to avoid unnatural placement of the subject, especially in terms of when photographing people in this manner, as a person standing stock still in the exact middle of the frame will often look very unrealistic.

 

Male Gaze

Male Gaze Theory

The Male Gaze theory is the idea of putting the viewers into the males eyes while the camera may linger on and essentially objectify on attractive woman. The Male Gaze theory is often seen as an unequal balance of either power or simply status due to the rarity of the counter idea of a Female Gaze.

Feminist views are very opposed to the concept of Male Gaze as it seems to encourage an unequal view of power and status to women. Male Gaze as a term first emerged in the 1970s though the concept has existed for much longer into film history than that and can be traced as far back to films such as Casablanca (1942) and in some cases earlier than that, though it was of course more reserved than our general concept of it in the modern age.

A prime example of the Male Gaze theory, in what many feminists consider an offensive use of women in media, as shown on this picture from The Spirit (2007) which got a lot of criticism for it's objectifying women, is for women to be shown either nude or simply in alluring postures for no reason other than to appeal to the male audience, which they feel makes women more objects than actual people.

For my research I will be using both qualitative and quantitative research.
Quantitative is useful when you want a quick, simple answer.
Qualitative is more in-detail and higher quality but is more time-consuming.

My name is Michael Rushton and I am taking the AS Media Course. I have made this blog to record my progress and work on my coursework project from now to April 2012.
My task will require me to make a front cover, two page spread and contents page for my music magazine, after research into other already existent music magazines.
However, first I will be making a front page and contents page for a school/college magazine as my preliminary task.